The two main pain points shared by most of the content marketers I talk to are:
1. They have problems getting good content written.
2. They don’t have any time to plan their content.
I’ve seen this over and over again with the clients I work with.
One of the most important documents you can create for your marketing campaigns is a content calendar… as it helps solve the above problems. But if you’re like most marketing professionals, you’re just too busy churning out content to sit down and create a calendar.
This means you’re throwing content online without any real plan to make sure it’s high quality
Now you’re probably thinking that creating a calendar is a daunting task and that you don’t have time to put one together. That’s where I come in…
The good news is I can do it for you (with a little input from you or your team). And once you have a calendar you’ll save yourself a lot of stress and time, and streamline your content creation process.
How does a content calendar help you?
There are four reasons why you should always create a calendar or content plan:
1. You’ll gain support for your marketing content more easily
Marketing professionals often can’t get buy-in or support for their content ideas.
If this is you, know that a calendar helps you achieve this support from the sales team (and other key people). You’ll show them all the content you’ll be creating over the next 3 months and explain how it will help your marketing campaigns be more successful.
This is a lot more convincing than pointing them to old blog posts or a few social media messages.
2. You’ll save a lot of time
Once the plan/calendar is ready, all you need to do is follow it. A calendar will help you see what you’re publishing and when you’re publishing it. In turn, you will be able to get all the key resources in place before you need them. And you will have a timeline of content assets you can repurpose from the main piece.
You’ll be a step ahead of most marketers, who are basically starting from square one each day, week, and month.
3. You’ll get more mileage from your content
Without a plan or a calendar, it’s hard to see opportunites that are often staring you in the face. What opportunities? Well, you’ll miss out on ways to repurpose your content into other formats to give you more mileage. A calendar can help you quickly see ways to take a piece of content and turn into many other pieces.
For example, a webinar can become a white paper, a blog post series, social media posts, a newsletter article, etc.
Remember, there’s no point in doing the hard work of creating a piece of markting content and then not transforming it into multiple assets. Developing a content calendar really helps you think about how you might do this.
4. You’ll develop better content
Anybody can write an article and throw it up on their website. What separates successful marketers from their peers is their ability to create useful, authoritative, and relevant marketing that genuinely helps solve a problem.
The best way to do this is with a content calendar. This document helps you come up with a theme for each month and then develop ideas around this theme. It’s much easier to develop content ideas when you have a constraint in place (like a theme).
Who is this service for?
The content calendar planning service is for marketing professionals in science and/or B2B technology companies.
Specifically it’s for marketers who are tasked with creating content for their company to generate leads, move prospects through their funnel, and to close sales… but are struggling to get it all done. You might be feeling stressed, burned out, and ready to put your fist through the wall :).
You might be lacking a plannning document that can streamline your efforts. You also might be lacking buy-in from other departments. (eg. sales) in your company.
If this is you… then I can help.
How this service works
When I create a content calendar for my clients, I go through a specific step-by-step process:
1. We have a kick -off call where I ask you questions about the resources you have available, information about your brand (customer personas, mission statement, etc), FAQs from you customers, existing buy-in from SMEs, upcoming product launches, your competition, and any media publications you read or publish in. Afterwards, I’ll also ask you to send me any information I wasn’t able to gather on the call.
2. I conduct an audit of your existing content. This means your blog, resources section, downloads, gated content, social media sites, etc.
3. The next step is a media audit, where I study several publications in your industry in order to find common, hotbutton issues. Even if you don’t plan on submitting articles to media publications, it’s a good idea to study different publications anyway because they have done the hard work of studying your audience and finding out their challenges.
4. I then research your competition and the content they are putting out. This includes looking at what they are doing well, what they’re doing badly (and where you can be better), and where your content has a chance to be unique.
5. After this research, I then brainstorm up to 100 content ideas. I then run these ideas through a set of criteria or filters to make sure they are relevant, timely, and unique.
6. Next, I’ll look for ways to repurpose the ideas that successfully meet the above criteria into additional assets. As mentioned above, there’s no point in creating content if you’re not going to leverage it as best as you can.
7. Finally, I’ll create a calendar for the next three months based on my findings. I’ll also create a summary and a PPT slide deck you can use to gain support.
In summary, the deliverables you get are:
1. A content calendar for the next 3 months – one that outlines the main content to create as well as repurposed content and social media posts.
2. A PowerPoint slide deck that summarises the calendar. You can show this to your sales team, SMEs, customer service people, and other key individuals in order to get support and buy-in.
3. My notes outlining what I discovered about your content, your competition’s content, and why I chose the specific content pieces in your calendar.
Your next step…
If you want me to create a content calendar for you, or you would like to know more, the first step is scheduling a Project Roadmap. Email me at colm@sciencecopywriting.com to schedule a 30-minute call.